My name is Helen Jones and I’m a doctor employed by the British Antarctic Survey. For the next nine months I’ll be working on board the James Clark Ross as she performs scientific research in the Southern Ocean and supplies the British research bases of Antarctica.
I’ve started this blog in the hopes of entertaining and giving people a chance to see some pretty pictures. I might even throw some science in occasionally!

Wednesday, 7 June 2017

We're Gonna Need a Bigger Boat...

The eagle eyed amongst you will have noted that after nine
long months, the James Clark Ross is back in the Northern Hemisphere. But what
have we been doing in the interim since gadding about in Montevideo and
discussing tattoos, I hear you cry!

We collected a new group of scientists from Recife on the
Brazilian coast line and delivered them to Ascension Island and the surrounding
sea mounts. Ascension Island is a lonely volcanic island in the middle of the
Atlantic. Its nearest neighbour, the island of St Helena is 800 miles away.
Definitely too far for a bowl of sugar! In point of fact, no-one is native to
Ascension. It appears to have been considered a desolate wilderness in the
middle of the ocean. One-time pirate William Dampier was ship-wrecked and
subsequently rescued from it. Other sea-farers used it as a letter box island
and a chance to get fresh meat in the form of turtles. But otherwise the tides of
men generally passed it by until Napoleon was exiled to St Helena. Suddenly it became crucial for the British
government to have a garrison there lest the French mount a rescue attempt for
Bonaparte. Since then Ascension Island
has played a crucial part in transatlantic cable laying, was a wartime military
base for the British and Americans and is a stepping stone in the air bridge
down to the Falklands.

Proof that the original military garrison on Ascension regarded it as something of a hardship posting

﻿

Turtles still lay their eggs on Ascension

An American WWII jeep restored to working order in the Ascension Museum

In 2015, a cross party consensus achieved with the help of
various NGOs determined that Britain and her overseas territories should have
marine protected areas. Ascension in particular is considered to be a “Hope
Spot” which means that enthusiastic human activity in the area hasn’t robbed it
of its biodiversity. The fisheries scientists, the Ascension Island government
and the foreign office have all been working together to try to form an
evidence based marine conservation area or “blue belt”. Put another way,
there’s no point in just plonking it down anywhere, you have to make sure that
it’s actually doing some good and protecting the areas and the species that
need to be protected.

That’s where National Geographic, EU Best and the Darwin
Plus Initiative grants came in. National Geographic in particular funded the
charter of the James Clark Ross and made a documentary on the science performed
aboard in line with their Pristine Seas campaign. EU Best and the Darwin Plus
Institute made it possible to fund the smaller boat that assisted us with
tagging operations and the post-doctoral analyses of the information garnered.

Shark Tagging

The initial crucial thing was mapping the sea bed. Surprisingly
large areas of ocean floor can be uncharted and it’s ever so embarrassing to
lose expensive scientific equipment because you smacked it into an underwater
cliff that you didn’t realise was there. In practice this meant that the JCR
steamed round in circles whilst using a multibeam echosounder to work out what
the ocean floor looks like. This is the same principle as an ultrasound; sound
waves are beamed out by the ship and are then reflected back when they hit
something solid. Receivers on the ship pick up the reflected wave and by using
the known speed of sound under water, a very clever computer program can work
out how far that sound wave has travelled before being reflected. And once all
of those millions of pieces of data are collated we have a map of the ocean
floor.

Once our map was generated, the scientists could get to work
on discovering what beasties were down there. Initially it was important to
work out where most of the biomass actually was. Again, echosounders were
employed to beam back information about differently dense tissues- those
tissues being likely to represent organic matter. This generated a broad brush
stroke picture of where the majority of sea life was but not necessarily what
it was. As previously suspected, most of the biomass was concentrated around
the sea mounts- under water mountains created by volcanic activity. Sea mounts
project upwards into the ocean, creating currents that channel deep sea
nutrients up into warmer, shallower waters.

Having located where the most of these organisms were
living, it was then time to see if we could get eyes on and actually work out
what types of organisms they were, what their environments looked like and if
there were any particularly vulnerable ecosytems. Benthic and pelagic cameras
were deployed to film these organisms in their natural habitats whilst at the same
time sister vessels were engaged in tagging sharks and tuna so that we could
work out the movement patterns of the larger predators. In particular we wanted
to know if the sharks and tuna spend all their time on the sea mounts or if
they have wider ranges because that would be important in terms of determining
how far out from the sea mount the marine protected area would need to extend.

Stills kindly shared from the National Geographic footage

Now the important question simply becomes why, should you as
the reader, even care about this information? Why is the creation of marine
protected areas thousands of miles from where you live (unless you live on St
Helena, you lucky duck) remotely relevant to you?

Well, for one thing, these marine ecosystems act as carbon
scrubbers. Algae in the water strip carbon from the atmosphere and cycle it
into the food chain. Once bigger organisms have consumed that carbon, not only
does it stay locked in their body for a number of years, but when they sink to
the seabed their bodies become trapped in oceanic ooze, thereby trapping the
carbon in the oceans for the long term. And if we want to avoid global warming,
trapping carbon is exactly what we need to do. Factories spend thousands every
year employing technologies to strip carbon from their waste emissions- these
ecosystems will do it for us for free!

On top of this, if you want to keep eating seafood- and my
favourite thing after chocolate is sushi- those fishing grounds need to be
managed responsibly. And that means keeping a lid on reckless overfishing and
monitoring stocks of fish. It means protecting the ecosystems that allow the
larger predators to flourish because I have yet to meet anyone who has told me
that they love eating plankton. And finally there is a certain moral imperative
to protect the oceans. As a species we have been singularly careless in our
treatment of this planet, regarding its wealth as boundless. But I hope and
believe that we are starting to recognise that all of our actions often have
consequences far beyond what we ever could have imagined. We cannot afford to
be like the Victorian landowner releasing rabbits in Australia because he
wanted something to shoot at from his veranda. If we want to continue to
survive on a planet that is a kindly and generous home we must protect it for
both ourselves and the generations to come.

And you never once mentioned the airport is closed to all but military traffic as the new RAF shuttle-bus is under CAA regulations and so cannot land because it carries too many people. BAS staff now have a different jump-off point. I'd stick to the JCR if I were you.